[LINK] US, Canada have priciest cell phone plans in the world

[Scott Howard]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Ivan Trundle <ivan at itrundle.com> wrote:

>
> On 18/10/2010, at 10:18 AM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>
> > What a pity they didn't include Australia.
> >
> >
> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/10/us-canada-lead-the-world-in-expensive-cell-packages.ars
>
> Anecdotal evidence tells me:
>

2. A mobile phone 'package' often include such things as unlimited calls to
> either others on the same network, or more often others on the same 'bill'
> (i.e. a family can have four mobiles and only pay one bill as if they were
> using one phone). This makes it extremely attractive even at the costs
> quoted.
>

Not quite.  With "family" plans, there's almost always an additional charge
for the additional "line", but they are normally quite low - often something
like US$10/month.  These plans then share the "minutes" between all phones
on the plans, and often give - as you've said - free calling between
"lines", and normally also to others using the same cell-phone provider.

There's only one exception to this that I'm aware of which is that T-mobile
has just released a "kids are free" promotion which does give additional
free "lines" for kids (to a maximum of 1 free per adult line), but this is
more of a promotion than an actual plan.


> 3. Mobile phone users pay for incoming minutes as well as outgoing in the
> US.
>

Correct, which is the big difference they failed to cover in this report -
the fact that there's no additional cost for calling from a landline to a
mobile phone as there would be in (say) Australia.  In Australia the cost of
landline calls to mobile phones is often a not insignificant cost that
simply doesn't exist in the US/Canada.  Obviously that's not a cost of the
mobile phone itself as such, but it's a part of the bigger cost of mobile
phones to the community as a whole.



> 4. Data plans in the US, from what I am told, are still so generous as to
> be virtually free for many of my friends: they have special packages that
> bundle voice and data in a way to make data effectively free, even though
> standard plans do not advertise this.
>

In general, this isn't true.  Most smartphone data plans start at around
US$30, and although there are occasionally ways around this (eg, claiming
you don't have a smartphone even through you do). Some of the
smaller/prepaid providers are starting to offer "web" included in their
unlimited plans, but the major providers are not doing this.

  Scott.